Showroom My 3 DOF seat mover + GS-4 + Simvibe

I think I made the right call on the motors due to my size. They have no problem moving me. I just need to find the right controller later. But for now it is working well.

Some more photos of my rig

My front kill switch. Only cable tied on at the moment until I make my new dash

A wide shot of my rig



My Accuforce Direct Drive wheel

I just had a thought, those batteries you are using, what is the voltage coming out and what is the voltage you are charging them with?
Are the batteries bridges together in anyway to give you the combination of having one big battery?
I had motor errors and spikes causing mine to stop until I finally took off the car battery and 13.8v psu and ran 2 x 12v psu.

It is a constant 13.8v

There is no advantage to running a bank of batteries versus one big one.

I only used these because I got them free from a UPS upgrade at work. UPS batteries are perfect because they are designed to be always charged but capable of heavy discharges.

They seem to cope fine. I can do a whole nights racing and they are still at 100% charge.

They are only acting as a buffer to protect my charger from these large spikes. The charger is plenty big enough to keep the batteries topped up.

can you get a solid 12v going through it?
Only a test, but I found in my case with my actuators, I had to go to 12v to solve a heap of problems
I never ran out of charge, but for some reason, I stopped spikes and errors on my set up from going from 13.8v - battery to dual 12v power supplies. And they are actually 12v output

@Avenga76

You already got the Accuforce? Awesome!

What have you got before?
And does it justify it's price?

@bsft I can't get 12V going though my systems easily. Battery chargers need to run a 13.8V or higher to charge. I turned off my charger and the batteries are holding at 13.4V. The only way to get them lower is to run them flat.

I am not sure of that would help because if you lower the voltage you increase the Amps and the Amps are what I am trying to cut down on.

For example, if I had a 160w motor @ 12V it would need 13.3A but @ 13.8V it would only draw 11.5A, with the peaks, a 70A peak @ 13.8V would be 80.5A @ 12v

I checked with the supplier and he said they the motors handle up to 16V and the JRK's handle from 6-16V so I think the more volts the better so I have less amps.

I could run the batteries down to test.

@prodigy I was a beta tester for the Accuforce so I have had my wheel for a while now.

Before this I have a Fanatec CSW v1 and before that a G27.

Is it worth the price? Very much so. It has completely changed the way FFB works. It is on a whole different level. I don't use in game FFB now. I disable the in game FFB and use the SimXperience FFB which uses the games telemetry to recreate the FFB using physics.

You guys know how powerful the telemetry from games are because it is what runs our motion, it is taking that power and using it on FFB.

And the power and speed of the Accuforce, it is unreal. I used to think the step up from the G27 to the CSW was huge, but this is a whole other level.

I wrote a couple of reviews on the Accuforce where I go in to greater detail.

http://www.isrtv.com/forums/topic/16563-avenga76s-simxperience-accuforce-review/

http://members.iracing.com/jforum/posts/list/575/3293454.page#8672951

I think this thing is gorgeous....except for one thing.........the plywood? Im surprised you stuck with that vs. diamond plate or something similar. You planning on painting it in the future?

Do you have a list of the gauges you are using? Those are pretty bad ass for sure as well.

@Avenga76 what size our your monitors? Are you happy with that size? Thanks!

Thanks. I still need to paint the plywood and powder coat the frame so it is not finished yet. I was even thinking of covering the plywood in a carbon fibre wrap. Not sure yet but the whole thing needs to come apart for the powder coating so I will do it then

All the round gauges are Autometer gauges. I also have 2 sim screens and a Sim Instruments dash.

They are 27" IPS monitors. I am happy with the size. Of course I would like to go bigger but it is about the biggest monitors I can find in New Zealand. I don't want to go with TV's because of the slow response time.

I see I can finally get a 32" in New Zealand but it is expensive and it isn't IPS http://www.pbtech.co.nz/index.php?z=p&p=MONSAM3285

Hi guys.

Here is a video of my motion simulator in action.

Hi @Avenga76,

I hope all is going well with your sim.

I recently read a post from you on another thread where you explained how your motors were creating errors and such - especially when reversing. I believe you talked about "toning" down your motors and/or some sort of "braking" settings you adjusted in the JRKs to help with this. Could you elaborate a little on that if so and tell me what your experience has been since utilizing the tuning methods you used for this? I am getting errors in much the same way and would appreciate your input. Thanks in advance!

Have a read of these 2 post.

PID didn't seem to have much effect on the overload errors.

Turning down the max duty cycles helped. 400 and it is mostly fine if I am driving. If I have guests over who are going to go off track then I will drop it down to 300, 250 if they are really bad. That seems to keep the errors in check well enough. I still get some but not enough to get in to that chain reaction of errors that you can see in some of my other videos.

The braking setting will fix it BUT it is no good for simulator use. It is under the motor tab. There is a field there called "Brake Duration(ms)" that will add a pause before changing direction. So if your motor is going full speed forward and you as it to go full speed in reverse then it will wait for the amount of milliseconds that you added in the brake duration field. This can go up to 1200ms which is a 1.2 second pause between changing directions. I can run my motors full noise with a 50-100ms pause without getting any errors but that would be terrible for a motion simulator when you are changing direction constantly, a 50ms pause between changes in direction would pretty much kill the motion you feel.

So it is not a solution at all. More just an experiment and a good way of showing exactly when and why these errors happen. With the brake setting on then it gives the motors a chance to spin down before changing direction but it is that quick direction change that you want in a simulator.

I think the only workaround is to limit the make duty cycles.

I think the only solution is to move to a more powerful controller like a Roboclaw 2x60a (2x120a peak)

I just think that with these faster motors the draw needed to overcome the inertia is too much for the JRK's to handle. The only option is to slow the motors down by limiting the duty cycles or add a pause. So really the duty cycle limit is the only real workaround.

BTW what RPM are your motors?

Do you ever use the Roboclaw 2x60a (2x120a peak) ?
Except the most important current and the fact that it can directly control two motors, are there others big differences compared with the JRK12V12 ?

It is not currently supported by SimTool. I need it for the higher current, not sure how it would be other than that.

I will start looking in to what is need to get one going soon, I think it is the way forward for those of us who use fast motors. Just don't know what will be involved in getting one going with Sim Tools.

Avenga, have you consider trying (buying) another motors? The aussies ones from Motion Dynamics are proven to work with JRK's and I don't know if @bsft is doing that anymore, but he could send them cheaper than what MD is asking for postage..

I can get those motors locally but I am a big guy, around 130kg, plus the GS-4 is around 25kg. So I have around 155kg sitting on top of my universal. Early on I discounted using the smaller 25:1 ratio motors due to the weight they will be moving.

My motors are great because they have tons of torque to move my fat ass. I think going down to smaller 25:1 motors is going the wrong way. I think the motors are the right size for a gentleman of my generous proportions, so I think it is best to keep my motors and find a controller which is powerful enough to run my motors.

I think Avenga is on the right track anyway. Working with PID and motor settings on JRK can take a long time.
I still keep in contact with motion dynamics bloke as he is 5 mins drive away.

Thank you for the detailed response @Avenga76! I knew I could count on you.

I hope to be far enough along to do some tuning this weekend. So far everything I have done has been no load testing. I am not sure what the RPM of the motors I am experimenting with is. I do some measuring of that since it will be good to know.

Thanks again!

Fwiw, i had a 300lb buddy on my 25's and while he didn't run the rig for a terribly long time, ( 1 laps of nords) the motor's didn't really complain much about moving near 2X the load it normally does. Also my Seat angle's aren't 100% ideal. So imo 50:1's would be more than ample. Its just these high RPM motor's thats causing the problems.